Book Review: The Gospel in Brief

[cjbanning]

The Gospel in Brief by Leo Tolstoy

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The most interesting thing about this book is not that it omits "the miracles," but that it is a harmonization of the four canonical gospels; that is, it edits together material from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John without regard to the specific and differing agendas the authors of each of those works were pursuing in their specific accountings of the Christ myth to their specific audiences in their specific places and times, in favor of Tolstoy's own pet interpretation of what the Christian message is (or should be) saying. In doing so, multiple perspectives are collapsed into a single perspective, and the gospel loses the important dialectical plurality manifested in the canonical version in favor of a dogmatic, modernist "one true reading."



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